The health care industry and other fields face many challenges due to the increasing cost of health care and the complexities involved in managing these costs. The industry must strive to provide the best available health care while controlling and managing the costs of providing that care. Since the costs of health care are often established by third-party payers such as insurance companies, the option of increasing the cost of services provided is not always available to health care providers. Therefore, the health care industry must focus on controlling operating costs to maintain a profitable business.
The mental health care field in particular faces many challenges to the management of the traditional therapeutic setting. In a typical environment of a therapist's treatment of a patient, the therapist will record observations, in narrative form, regarding the patient's progress and response to treatment. While this method may be of value to the therapist's treatment strategy, it also may be subjective and thus not provide for objective feedback. Furthermore, comparing how two different patients respond to treatment from two different therapists may be very difficult when both therapists use this method of recording the patient's progress.
There is a need in the health care industry for systems that manage health care and result in an efficient health care strategy for managing costs. These systems will provide, among other things, efficient admission of patients, accurate diagnosis of patient needs, and application of effective proven treatment.
There is in particular a need in the mental health care field for a system that applies objective standards to patient treatment in order to provide documentation of a patient's progress and the effectiveness of treatment. This documentation may, for example, be valuable to insurance companies in order to justify the coverage of treatment under an insurance policy. This documentation may also provide objective analysis of treatment so that a patient may be matched with the most effective type of treatment.
There is a further need in the mental health care field for efficient methods of objectively tracking a patient's progress. Fulfilling all of these needs will assist the mental health care industry to manage the treatment of patients and control costs of treatment.
The present assessment and information display inventions solve these and other shortcomings of the prior art described above. The present assessment and information display inventions also solve other shortcomings of the prior art which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification.